(1) Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an information processing apparatus and, more particularly, to an information processing apparatus for obtaining information from a server storing attribute information indicating the attribute and logical structure of each piece of information or each service which can be provided and for providing it to a client.
(2) Description of the Related Art
A Web page which a user first accesses to connect to the Internet is sometimes referred to as a portal site.
A portal site is usually a search engine, which provides services to retrieve information scattered on the Internet by a keyword.
Such a portal site collects information disbursed on the Internet by the use of, for example, a search robot, and creates a database on the basis of it. When a keyword is given by a user, the portal site retrieves the appropriate information from the database and provides it to the user.
In conventional methods, a database is created from information on the Internet by associating and storing the uniform resource locator (URL) of a page described in the hypertext markup language (HTML) and meta-information (keyword, for example) described on that page, which are obtained by a search robot. When a keyword is given by a user, meta-information corresponding to the keyword is retrieved and the meta-information and URL obtained are returned as retrieval results.
By the way, on a portal server currently used, display is customized according to users. Display contents can be customized according to users or groups and only contents in which each user is interested can be selectively displayed.
With a portal page currently used, however, the administrator of a portal site needs to build up a system in which display can be customized according to users. This involves troublesome work. Furthermore, if the amount of information to which reference is being made increases or if information to which reference is being made is changed, work to cope with this must be performed.